As I told you, we went off into the Piney Woods of Jackson, MS for our Summer vacation retreat this year! Miss Grace was VERY excited as she had her field guides, field bags and camera ready (you'll get to see some of her many pictures (she went through a whole 256 mb sd card!) on Wednesday, as this week's Wordless Wednesday post!).
While we live in a rural urban area, but forests even 3 hours away are very different, and I wanted her to see the old trees and petrified stones (from trees). She also wanted to see fossils, and we have no museum nearby that has a good collection, so I knew the Jackson MS Museum of Natural Science would fill the bill nicely. And it did!
The Museum is just off the interstate, making it easy to find. And it sits next to the Jackson Children's Museum, and a very large park, so you can make a whole DAY of visiting the area (the Ag Museum is across the street from the entrance road, so you can cover all sciences in one day!)!
Yup, we went while they were having a reptile exhibit!
I though Miss Grace would be apprehensive, but she actually loved checking out the HUGE snakes (yes, that is a very LONG rattlesnake skin the employee is holding above!), frogs and turtles, not to mention the alligators! In fact, things we learned about alligators, including what their different calls to each other sound like, came in handy the next day while at the res (more on that on another post later this week!)
Something that I love about the museum is that you can print out lots of educational materials via a Teachers Guide, pdfs on the flora and fauna, and the Kids Corner page, to study in advance, and to use during your visit (great to keep the jaded older kids occupied) and afterwards. The print outs are great for homeschooling as well, even if you can't visit the museum! They also have a Preschool Room just for 3-5 year olds, with hands on activities!
The geckos were a hit will all the kids- for how large they were and how well they could hang on the walls! Seeing the turtles eating and the small alligators at eye level were pretty cool to Miss Grace!
The fossils were a priority and one of the first things you get to see when you come into the main floor of the museum- the Ancient Toothed Whale is hanging from the ceiling! It is MASSIVE! And then the center display showing just how BIG a sloth was and how much smaller a saber tooth tiger was. And yes, I pulled out the Ice Age Diego and Sid metaphors for reference! Miss Grace was delighted to see that sea turtles haven't changed much, and scared of the HUGE fish like the ones that chased the animals in Ice Age!
Speaking of Ice Age, that is a mammoth tooth above. I loved the hands on exhibits, like the check out the mini fossils and skeletons ,that allowed Miss Grace to feel like a scientist! She really LOVED the duck exhibit and went all the way around counting all the ducks she has personally seen out in the wild! She did pretty good with having seen 4/5ths of them! The museum focuses on flora and fauna from the Mississippi area, so I shouldn't have been surprised!
It was interesting to compare the mammoth skull to modern cow skulls, so Miss Grace could get an idea on just HOW big a mammoth was. She was pretty impressed! And yes, she had pose with the cougar! The Mississippi fauna exhibits were really well done, for being such a small museum, to show how the animals live, and to give kids a realistic look at them!
Other 'hands on' situations presented themselves as well:
Compareing her hand to the paw print of a black bear, and her fist to the size of the FREAKIN HUGE rattlesnake's head. It might be a little hard to tell, but it's head was ALMOST the same size as her fist. Ewwww, heebie jeebies time. I swear it looked at us like "if I could ONLY get out of this glass....". I was quite happy to move on from that exhibit! LOL
Miss Grace was equally happy to pose with the deers- "oo they are the size of the ones I want to hunt and kill". Sigh, only my kid goes to a nature museum and discusses kill ratios....
The large tree stump was a great precursor to our going to the Petrified Forest, and was a great way to show her HOW old large trees are. She instantly wanted to measure our Magnolia tree when we got home! It's over a 100 years, we know for sure!
The museum has an outside trail that showcases Mississippi flora, but as it was a 94 degree day, with heat index of 103, and a healthy swarm of mosquitoes by the swamp exhibit area, we opted to forgo that tour and check out some of the adjacent boulders instead! They have 4 super large ones, and we had to take pix on every one of them, but I just showed the best 2!
I hope you enjoyed looking at our pictures and we highly recommend if you go to Jackson, to check out the museum! It only takes about 2 1/2 hours -if you check out the free film, and spend some time in the gift shop (which we did of course! They have some really unique items!).
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